


burn out before i wake

by glorious_spoon



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Angst, Coda, Depression, Episode: s03ep17 Heavenly Fire, Hangover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2020-01-11 23:33:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18434414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: So this is what a hangover feels like. What a lovely aspect of existence as a mundane that he gets to experience now.





	burn out before i wake

**Author's Note:**

> I mostly just needed to get this scene out of my head, tbh.

Waking up feels like wrestling his way out of a sticky, smothering cocoon, and when he finally manages to peel his eyelids open, even the dim morning light filtering in through the closed blinds makes his head ache. His mouth tastes like something died in it, and he swears he can actually feel whiskey seeping out of his pores. Smell it, too. On his side of the bed, Alec is still fast asleep; he’s not even touching Magnus, but the ambient heat of his body feels uncomfortably like standing too close to a furnace. He’s still mostly dressed and sweating through his clothes. It’s possibly the most disgusting he’s ever felt, and he lived in London before it had proper sewers.

So this is what a hangover feels like. What a lovely aspect of existence as a mundane that he gets to experience now.

Magnus levers himself carefully upright, moving slowly both out of respect for his pounding head and unsettled gut and because he really doesn’t want to wake Alec up. He has a feeling that when he does, Alec is going to want to talk, and they really… probably should, but he just can’t. Not right now. 

There’s a glass of water and two round white pills on the bedside table. A note in Alec’s handwriting reads, sternly, _DRINK ALL OF THIS WHEN YOU WAKE UP!!!_

His Alexander. Always looking out for him, even after Magnus has made such a wreck of everything between them. Magnus sighs and leans over to pick up the glass, condensation smearing on his palms. 

Everything about last night seems disjointed and hazy, especially after the last five drinks or so, but the blackout that he was half-hoping for hasn’t materialized. He remembers crashing into the solid heat of Alec’s body, how struggling to pull away somehow turned into clinging, weeping, the shoulder of Alec’s jacket going wet beneath his cheek as they sank to the floor together. Alec’s voice soft and frantic and then suddenly, deliberately calm, soothing him until he managed to let go, and then stepping back to the table for a glass of water, settling back down beside him and coaxing him to drink it in slow, careful sips.

Abusing his administrative access to take the emergency passages back to their room so they didn’t encounter anyone on the way there. Holding a cold damp cloth to the back of Magnus’s neck and stroking his back while he vomited up about about a quart of whiskey and then helping him out of his shoes and his jacket and tucking him into bed like a fucking child. 

God. Magnus has probably had more humiliating nights in his four hundred years of life on Earth, but he certainly can’t remember one now. Shame curdles in his gut, thick and nauseating.

He must make a sound after all, because Alec shifts, rolls onto his back, rubs a hand clumsily over his face, and opens his eyes. There’s a crease from the pillow on one cheek, and his hair is a disaster, and he’s luminous, possibly the most beautiful person Magnus has ever seen. He seems as far away and untouchable right now as the sun.

“Magnus?” he says. His voice creaks with sleep. “How’re you feeling?”

“No worse than I deserve,” Magnus says honestly. He rolls the glass between his palms. “I’m sorry for ruining dinner.”

Something shifts in Alec’s face, an odd, heartbroken flicker. Magnus thinks that it probably wouldn’t be detectable to anyone who hasn’t spent hours cataloging all of Alec’s expressions, but he has, and he notices. He doesn’t know what it means, but he notices.

“Don’t worry about it,” Alec says finally, and he actually does sound sincere. “There’ll be other dinners. I just want to know if you’re okay.”

“That is a loaded question, Alexander.”

“Yeah,” Alec sighs. “I guess it is.”

“I feel…” Magnus shakes his head, sips from the water glass to prevent himself from putting any of the first five things that occur to him into words. Eventually, he comes up with, “I need a shower.”

A shower is good. A shower is actionable. He can wash the stink of stale whiskey off of him, at least; it won’t fix any of his actual problems, but maybe he’ll feel a little better.

“Okay, Magnus,” Alec says, very quietly.

*

He doesn’t feel any better.

He dresses to the nines when he gets out, a black tunic with a hundred tiny pearl-headed buttons that take him five minutes to do up without magic. He bought it in… Singapore, maybe? Somewhere in that general geographic area, at least, twenty years or more before Alec was born. Alec sits on the bed and watches him with an expression that’s more thoughtful than Magnus is used to seeing from him this early in the morning, and when he’s done, he says, softly, “Are you okay?”

“For a certain extremely limited definition of the term, yes,” Magnus tells him, because he’s done lying to Alec about things that matter. It hasn’t worked out well for either of them recently. “I smell better, at least. So there’s that.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Definitely not.”

“Okay,” Alec says again. He hesitates, worrying at the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger with his blunt nails, then says, without quite meeting Magnus’s eyes, “Magnus, I’m sorry. I wasn’t--I should have been paying more attention, I shouldn’t have assumed you were okay now just because I wanted to believe that we could—”

“Stop,” Magnus interrupts quietly, and the rush of words cuts off like a door has slammed between them. He presses his thumbs to his aching temples, trying to press out some of the foggy pain. Unsuccessfully. Alec still isn’t meeting his eyes, and that makes it easier, somehow, to find the words. “I didn’t want you to know. I’m a proud man, Alexander. Do you think it’s easy for me to be this weak? To see you look at me like—”

Like the way Alec is looking at him now, expression soft, eyes wide and worried. This time Magnus is the one to look away, and Alec shifts, pushing away the covers to stand and cross the room, to take Magnus’s hands in his. There’s something tentative about it, like he’s expecting to get slapped away, and it breaks some small part of Magnus’s heart to see it.

“You’re not weak,” he says, very firmly.

Magnus sighs, curling his fingers around Alec’s. “I am. Right now, I am.”

Alec wants to argue. He has that stubborn expression that always precedes some kind of declaration, but this time it doesn’t make it out of his mouth. He squeezes Magnus’s hand instead, lifts it to press a kiss to his knuckles. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

“Very sure,” Magnus says, although he’s not. Part of him wants to grab onto Alec like he did last night, to sob out all of his grief and frustration and icy fear into the heatsink of his body. It’s only a small part, though, and unlike last night it’s not the one in charge of making decisions. He pulls his hands away from Alec’s, pats his shoulders. “You should go get ready for work. You have to be at the ops room in half an hour.”

“I’m the Head of the Institute, I can take the day off if I want to.”

“And do what? Hang around here waiting for me to have another alcohol-fuelled breakdown?” Alec flinches, and Magnus scrubs a hand over his face, abruptly disgusted with himself. He just can’t stop, can he? “I’m sorry. That was unfair.”

“It’s fine.”

“It really isn’t,” Magnus says, and he means the whole damn mess of a situation, but he pulls Alec down for a brief kiss anyway. “I’m not going to drown myself in a bottle of whiskey in your absence. Go take a shower. Keep your siblings from bringing about the end of the world before breakfast. I’ll go… I don’t know. Run some errands. We can--” He hesitates. “I will talk to you about it, I promise. But not right now.”

“Okay,” Alec says finally. “If you’re sure.”

“I am. Go.”

*

The shower is still running when he starts idly picking up the scattered clothes on the floor. His own crumpled pants and jacket, which will definitely need to be professionally cleaned. There’s no way he’ll trust a bespoke jacket to an Institute laundry more concerned with getting ichor out of combat gear, and it’s not as though he can just magic away the spills and stale drunk-sweat anymore.

Dry cleaners, that’s the word. He’ll have to locate a reputable one in his now copious free time.

He lets the pants fall from his hands, then sinks down onto the floor, and then, because Alec isn’t there to see it, drops his face into his palms, presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until white spots bloom in his vision.

Everything is so fucking difficult now. Even such a stupid little thing as laundry is a reminder of what he doesn’t have anymore.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there, breathing harshly in the stillness of Alec’s bedroom, the sound of the shower in the other room distant and faded, before he finally manages to lift his head. He scrapes a hand over his dry face, and then he stands up, picks up the pile of discarded clothes on the floor, and goes to drop them in the hamper, and as he does something drops out of the pocket of Alec’s good pants to land with a clatter on the floor.

A box. A little round silver box, just about the right size for—

Like looking out the wrong end of a telescope, Magnus remembers again the candlelit table, the roses, the carefully beautiful setting of it. Alec’s nervous, distracted, happy tension yesterday morning.

Alec, standing up to get him a glass of water and pausing for a moment at the table to pick something up and pocket it, the sudden slump of his shoulders.

_Fuck._

He really does ruin everything, doesn’t he?

Moving like he’s in a dream, he flips the lid of the box open. It shouldn’t be a shock to see the Lightwood crest, but somehow it is. The ring feels heavy in his palm, and when he slips it onto his finger, it fits perfectly. The last person to wear this was Maryse, who definitely doesn’t wear the same size as him, so Alec must have had it refitted.

It looks good on his hand. Magnus splays his fingers out, staring at it, and just for a moment allows himself to imagine an alternate version of last night where he could have sat down across from Alec and enjoyed the way his smile looked in the candlelight. Where he could have been delighted by the sight of this, where he could have let Alec slip it onto his finger and leaned across the table to kiss the smile off of his mouth—

The shower shuts off. Magnus yanks the ring off with fingers made clumsy by haste, jams it back in the box, and tucks that back into the pocket of Alec’s discarded pants. He leaves those on the floor, shoves his own clothes into the hamper, hesitates, listening to Alec move around the bathroom. His chest feels numb and bruised, his throat tight.

If he stays here, Alec will ask him what’s wrong, and Magnus has already used up his daily quota of sobbing into his boyfriend’s shirt. He shoves his feet into his boots instead, and slips out of the room without a sound.


End file.
